Gun Ho Jang is the winner of the 2010 Pierre Robillard Award of the Statistical Society of Canada. This prize recognizes the best Ph.D. thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university in a given year.

 

Gun Ho’s thesis is entitled “Invariant Procedures for Model Checking, Checking for Prior-Data Conflict and Bayesian Inference.” It was written at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Michael Evans. In his work, Gun Ho focused on invariant procedures in Statistics, that is, the results of two statisticians’ independent data analyses, based upon the same statistical theory and using effectively the same statistical ingredients, are the same. He proposed assessments of single null hypotheses without any specific alternative hypothesis which are applicable for both model checking and checking for prior-data conflict. Then he explored properties of relative surprise inferences, an invariant Bayesian inference methodology which compares the belief changes from a priori to a posteriori, such as consistency and asymptotic normality.